Cockroaches and Gym

I really am a danger to myself.

After getting home from chairing an NA meeting, I was pretty much buggered, but with a healthy eating plan being a part of my life and trying to shift my post rehab weight (not like Nicole Richie thanks), I endeavored to make some veggies and tuna to munch on whilst I got down to doing some writing. Having put some butternut and other veg on the stove, I retreated to my room to write. After spending an hour playing Mob Wars on Facebook, I realized a smell of burnt butternut was seeping into my room from my kitchen. I dashed to the stove and found the veggies in a state of charcoaling at the bottom of the pot. Scraping out what wasn’t burnt to eat for dinner, I remembered my mother’s clever advice for burnt pot cleaning – add some Handy Andy in hot water in the pot and boil it on a low setting for a little while. So I made my cleaning fluid concoction and put the burnt pot on the stove to boil slowly and went back to my room to do attempt some writing again.

After playing another hour of Mob Wars, once again, I was alerted by a burning smell as before. But this burning smell was worse than vegetables. It was burnt Handy Andy. The pot was even more black, but this time, it stank. If you have ever burnt soap, you will know what this smells like but unless you are either a soap maker or as stupid as I am, you will not have experienced this pungent aroma. Like bad soap. Evil soap. Disgusting soap. The fumes were so strong I had to open all the doors in my house leading outside to try and get rid of the smell, hoping the toxic vapour would not kill me or make me high. It took a while, and a lot of toilet spray before I could breathe again without wanting to bring up my burnt dinner.

The pot is still sitting on my stove, I am hoping that if I ignore it, it will clean itself and put itself away in the cupboard without bothering anyone like a good pot.

So this evening, my new housemate came to visit. After many cups of coffee, cigarettes and talk about our messed up parents, I went to my computer to show him my prized and illegal copy of the Muse live at Wembley DVD. Now I love Muse. I love Matthew Bellamy and want to marry him. But then I found out he married some Italian wench called Gaia POLLONY, and it made me quite upset. Pollony?!!! Bitch. She ruined the song Starlight for me. She told English Cosmo it belongs to her and Matt. Seriously, she can have it. I had dreams of him dedicating it to me from a packed stage in London. Not any more, thanks to that ungrateful skank.

So I was busy gushing over how talented he is and monitoring his incredible piano playing talent (Matthew Bellamy, not house mate, I don’t know if he can play piano) with my back to my bedroom wall.

“Oh look a cockroach” my new housemate alerted me.

Turning around I observed what is the one thing in the world that terrifies me though most – a roach. Ever since a bad experience in Durban with a nonexistent pendant on a necklace and a three inch cockroach, I have not been a fan. At all.

And this particular roach was about the length of my index finger and FAT. And whirring its feelers. On my wall.

In a panic, I lurched backwards, away from the wall but could not get far as my desk was in the way. Treading on my poor new housemate’s foot, I fled the room, taking a few speakers with me who’s cables were caught around my other foot.

Anyway, I doomed the roach, stood on it and doomed it again. And then stood on it again. Apologising profusely to my new roomie, I felt about as big as that roach. Well, maybe smaller. He said it was fine, but I don’t think his foot agreed.

I have to go to bed now, gym in the morning.

Ah I love the gym. And detest it at the same time. It amazes me how some ladies can pull off full make up and a workout without breaking a sweat. Thing is, the men at the gym are hardly “modest”. The ones that are modest are modest for a reason. If I was to think of anywhere worse to pick a man up than a gym, it would have to be Cmax prison. But the gym is pretty bad.

A while ago, what must have been an ex rugby star who got thrown out of the sport for steroids was next to me on a treadmill. Literally this guy put the damn machine on so fast he couldn’t keep up with it. Seeing a man with a 100kg frame running at 15km/hr is quite something. And not something that lasts. After about ten seconds and almost coming off the back, he stopped the machine, did a kind of “yeah”-self affirmation-type-effort and hopped off.

Later I was on a rowing machine and he got onto the one next to me. I was beginning to get a complex – was he going on the same machines as me to make himself look better? Maybe it was in my head, but when he started pulling the rowing cord so hard that he could have powered New York with for a month from the machine (but only for about ten seconds), I began to wonder. And then… the girlfriend turned up.

Not particularly pretty, but one of the ‘in girls’ slaving to status came up. I wondered if it was his sister but no, definately his girlfriend. Now if this guy had been a gentle and nice person, I could have seen reason behind the couple. But this guy was far from it and a complete egotist. Who had been thrown out of rugby for steroids, remember?

Then I realized the mutual benefit of the Christina Storm/James small relationship – the rugby man, model woman relationship strategy. She wants money and fame status, he wants prettier-lady-than-his-neighbour-status. Well they definitely had that. And not much else, maybe two brain cells between them. I see them at the gym often, him pushing weights far too heavy for him which he drops on occasion and she doing alluring stretches in front of the mirror. I wish them the best; it seems a mutually beneficial relationship. Maybe with their two brain cells added together they have a fighting chance of finding the car in the parking lot after their workout. I have names for them – steroid banned rugby man and pretty but brainless cling on.

There are other names for the regulars I see there: anorexic alcoholic woman, extremely hairy KGB man, ultra muscly coloured lady, fitness junkie grandma, insane Indian groaning man and crazy naked stretching woman (don’t ask – if you have been inside a gym changing room, you know what I am talking about)¸amongst others.

The changing rooms in the gym scare me. My first month at the gym I would leave the ladies room feeling rather violated and like crying. I don’t know if it is just me, but I pretty much shower in a towel. I don’t have a great figure but I think if I did, I would not take part in the naked acrobatics that those women seem to love. When I was in high school, I had the art of getting my gym kit on under my school uniform before removing uniform technique down to a tee. But these ladies must have gone to a French school or something.

The things I have seen in that locker room… cannot be unseen. Really, I have come close to vomiting. Not from bad hygiene, just from attention seeking displays of ladies private parts that I really, really, really, really could do without seeing. Actually one incident was bad hygiene. A rather large lady in the steam room was not using a towel and had her, erm, nether regions spread across the tiles. When she got up, she made the most massive squelching sound from her private parts suctioning on the tiles that I nearly vomited on the spot. Apart from that, the general naked bitchiness is just a little too much to handle, but I am a little more used to it by now.

When it comes to the machines, I am the bitch, I always look at what everyone else is doing on their screens and if I am going at a harder rate than them, I feel like a better person. Fuck the lot of them 